I am again sorry for giving you short rations in terms of original posts. I am slogging along on what will hopefully be some titillating original reporting, and am also contending with laptop loss fallout and resulting time sinks. There is still a possibility the TLC can locate the cab (they said they’d get back to me with the results of a detailed search by end of day yesterday but didn’t). In the meantime, I am checking out replacement options and consultants. In another proof of the severity of Apple crapification, I was shocked to learn that even on laptops, you can’t upgrade the RAM! WTF?!?

DW (furzy)

Mashable

This Insider. Dan K: “Certified underdogs.”

CNN (David L)

MedicalXpress (Chuck L)

Grist

Sun. Oh, it’s just a sin Herxheimer’s reaction.

NBC (furzy)

PhysOrg (Chuck L)

NBC (Chuck L)

Guardian

Vox (UserFriendly)

The Conversation

George Monbiot, Guardian

Brexit

DW

Guardian. This is silly. Clive by e-mail:

The referendum was, constitutionally-speaking, advisory. It had, legally, as much weight as a Daily Mail headline. Parliament voted to trigger Article 50. It could have voted to trigger Article 50 even without a referendum. If it’d wanted to decide based on the result of a game of Happy Families with Leave and Remain teams competing, it could have done that, too.

From guurst. If you click on the tweet proper, there is a tiny “translate tweet” link at the bottom of the text:

Associated Press. Great. I see a future with no public transportation for me. I opt out of scanners at the airport. As a reader who has worked on military-related projects has pointed out, if you go through and airport scanner, after as few as two trips, they can match your scan to you, effectively creating a biometric ID

BBC. I’ve assumed this to be the case, that if your device has GPS location, the only way to disable that is to put it in a Faraday bag or remove the chip.

Imperial Collapse Watch

Ian Welsh

Trump Tranistion

Wall Street Journal

Bloomberg. A lawyer buddy says that means Manafort’s team is confident that they can win the argument that the government didn’t meet its burden of proof. We’ll see soon enough if they are right.

Washington Post. UserFriendly: “Why isn’t he behind bars?”

Intercept

FiveThirtyEight. Dan K:

Gah. There was clearly enough analysis done (mentioned in several detail discussions) to post a second chart aggregating by contest rather than by candidate to eliminate multiple endorsement effects, as discussed here:

In races that have been called so far, 192 candidates were granted that [“gun sense” candidate] label and 79 of them won, for a win rate of 41 percent. But in many cases, gun sense candidates were running against each other in the same districts, which brought their overall win rate down. It might be fairer [ya think?!?!] to look at the how often any gun sense candidate was nominated in races where at least one person received that designation; when we do that, we find that a gun sense candidate won the Democratic nomination in 79 percent of races where Moms Demand Action had awarded the designation to at least one candidate.

Jonathan Turley

The Hill

New Economic Perspectives

New McCarthyism

Caitlin Johnstone

American Banker

Independent

CNBC

Medium. IowanX: “I think this is a really interesting take on stuff. A long cup of coffee, but likely evergreen. I like this Andrew Dobbs guy from Austin. Housing IS health care! Who knew!”

Bloomberg (Li)

Class Warfare

Quartz (Chuck L)

Wall Street Journal (UserFriendly)

MinnPost (UserFriendly)

VoxEU

Wall Street Journal

Antidote du jour. From MGL:

Here are series of photos of jellyfish (sorry, can’t say what kind) we came upon on shore of Tutka Bay, AK. This one was snagged on barnacles as tide had receded. Have no idea if once cast ashore jellyfish are goners, but we watched as the tide came in to see what would happen. It did indeed break free of barnacles as bottom photo shows, but didn’t clearly drift away. We were rooting for it to have a safe return to the bay.

And a sort of anti-antidote from Igancio: “Find attached pictures of ‘Plastozilla’. I found this “monster” created to educate people about the risks of plastic waste in Oslo in mid July.”

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211 comments

We’re in a new age of obesity. How did it happen? You’d be surprised George Monbiot, Guardian

The shift has not happened by accident. As Jacques Peretti argued in his film The Men Who Made Us Fat, food companies have invested heavily in designing products that use sugar to bypass our natural appetite control mechanisms, and in packaging and promoting these products to break down what remains of our defences, including through the use of subliminal scents. They employ an army of food scientists and psychologists to trick us into eating more than we need, while their advertisers use the latest findings in neuroscience to overcome our resistance.

The thrill of disapproval chimes disastrously with industry propaganda. We delight in blaming the victims
They hire biddable scientists and thinktanks to confuse us about the causes of obesity. Above all, just as the tobacco companies did with smoking, they promote the idea that weight is a question of “personal responsibility”. After spending billions on overriding our willpower, they blame us for failing to exercise it.
====================================================
It just seems when neoliberalism and personal responsibility became the watch words, everything went to h*ll in a hand basket.
When was the last time you saw a commercial to eat an apple, or exercise?

We are dealing with millions of years of evolutionary biology. See sugar, eat sugar. See fat, eat fat. Back on the plains of Africa it was a great day when you found a beehive with honey or killed a nice fat antelope; you stuffed your face and walked ten kilometers back to your cave. You then ate grubs and leaves for a month.
McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Hershey all know this. I used to blame fat people for being fat. Now I am middle-aged and blame advertising, retail food and myself….but still can’t help being a few kilos overweight. I guess I should blame Lucy.

I disagree. First of all, there was no mass starvation during the Great Depression. Second, I don’t understand how epilepsy affects genetics.
It seems more likely that most American immigrants would have affected by starvation or malnutrition, which was the case of African slaves, Irish, and other various waves of immigrants fleeing deprivation, war and famine from all corners of the globe. But mankind has faced deprivation and malnutrition since the dawn of…well…mankind. Why weren’t Americans obese in the 19th century, or why are Somalis morbidly obese today.
I cannot discount the possibility that there was some incredible genetic shift in the American gene pool since the 1930’s but based on the reading I have done (I am a lay geneticist at best) it seems unlikely that gene selection would have occurred on any scale necessary to explain the phenomenon. It is possible that deprivation during the great depression (something which is unproven and disputed…do you intend to cite the Pravda story?) triggered specific metabolic changes in people at that time, but there is no scientific evidence to show that any genetic change was passed down.
I don’t wish to seem condescending, but I recommend a few primers on genetics which will help you understand why your suggestion is scientifically unreasonable.

My quick and dirty research has not found anything that suggests that epigenetic behavior can be passed to a third generation. So a malnourished mother can pass epigenetic traits to the fetus (though obesity was not mentioned in anything I read) and a malnourished child can become an obese adult, but nothing indicates that a malnourished grandparent creates an obese grandchild. There are equally plausible psychological explanations for this as well. A deprived, famished child might very well simply eat more when food is available, a behavior that might have nothing to do with his genes.

IIRC there is Swedish research showing that boys who experienced an episode of starvation pre-puberty have longer-lived grandchildren. 100+ years ago, episodic starvation was not uncommon in northern Sweden as crops would fail in a bad year so close to the northern limit of agriculture.

Holland 1944 and the Dutch Hunger Winter. The Nazis divert all the food in Holland to Germany. The Dutch diet thus goes from normal to starvation level. 3rd trimester fetuses develop super thrifty metabolisms due to nutrient deficiency and thus become much more likely (19 fold increase in risk) to develop metabolic diseases such as diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, etc. because their bodies keep a greater than normal percentage of nutrients – sugar, sodium, fat – all stored. They in turn have offspring who are at a greater risk because the mothers’ thrifty metabolisms don’t share as freely with their offspring.

Video’ed lecture and text,
on the appropriately named,
Robert Sapolsky Rocks
.com

On an anecdotal note, both my grandparents were dirt poor (NYC Italian Barber and Pennsylvania Coal Miner) and had children during the Depression. It was a hungry time for them both. They had no metabolic health issues. My mother had heart disease and diabetes, my whole family is overweight but me. But I need to stay on a low calorie low fat high carbohydrate diet to keep my cholesterol and weight low. In this vegetable oil soaked world we have today it is not easy.

Sure, I read those studies as well. But starvation and malnutrition is a common feature of human history so we should see episodic obesity throughout history.
While there was rationing during WWII, I don’t remember ever hearing about or reading about malnutrition.
Epigenetics leads to phenotype expression and seems to be multi-transgenerational for certain phenotypes, but this has not been demonstrated for adiposity.
Again, why aren’t Somalis or Ethiopians all obese? Or Cambodians, etc.
While I cannot deny epigenetics, there is no compelling evidence to suggest it is entirely or principally responsible for obesity. There are cultural and economic factors which appear to be far more important.

There has only been food sufficiency or food shortage throughout most of history. Wildly excessive food sur is a very modern thing.

Also, industrially remanufactured food-input product is only about 150 years old or less. Obesogenic de-fiberized starch and sugar and mass quantities of fats and oils are pretty recent, I think. And so is the fat-forming response.

I did not say epigentics was the only responsible factor. What I am saying is that it might not be as simple as “there is too much food”. This is important because treatment for obesity and it’s effects will be different for each genetically diffent group of people. So for some people eating less is not an answer, a better answer needs to focus on eating less of what?

I suspect the rise in obesity is caused in a lager part by caloric supply, but the rate of obesity changes in the US since the 80’s has been historically unusual. One odd change is that while the percent of obese Americans has increased, the percent of over weight (but not obese) Americans has stayed the same. This might be a signal of bifurcation because of genetics.

By the way, obesity rates are rising in Somalia as well and they rise faster when the move to European countries, even ones with lower obesity rates like France. This is why there is discussion that gene changes may also play a role in obesity. It might also just be stress that causes the weight gain. Or all of these issues.

(“Epigentics leads to phenotype expression” is not a sentence that makes sense. Phenotype is a combination of the expression of the combination of both genetics and epigentics. Epigenetic changes can change phenotype expression and I assume that is what you meant.)

Humans can live in states of starvation for a long time. Starvation is not death. But even malnutrition can lead to epigentic changes.

Anecdotally, my Grandfather was born in 1905 and lived in Manhattan. What he saw was extreme malnutrition,if not starvation, in himself and quite a number of other people. Maybe the denial of severe malnutrition in the US is propaganda as well.

Ha sorry, spell check changed epigentics to epileptics! That must have been confusing.

You’ll have to trust me when I say I know genetics and epigentics.

Epigentic changes are happening in you right now because of what you are exposed to in the environment and can be transferred to your offspring. These epigentic changes may become permanent genetic changes if the new offspring are subjected to the same environment. By the way, even just worrying about food will change your epigentics.

I am not saying it is only genetic. I am saying it might just be the perfect storm. It’s just an idea that is being tossed around by researchers.

There’s evidence in the opposite direction of the passed-on genetic effects of improved diet, though, isn’t there? I wouldn’t ordinarily quote the Telegraph but this article is based on just one of a bunch of studies suggesting that the restricted diets of world war 2 in the UK passed on a whol host of benefits to the baby boom generations…

You are forgetting that the environment works at the population genetics level – populations respond to selection. An example would be the studies of Pima-Papago Indians and levels of diabetes 2 & obesity –
As their diet changed, and levels of activity fell, their genetic backgrounds (from 2000 years of a low fat, highly active lifestyle) became a handicap, rather than an advantageous adaptation. Because of modern medicine, selection hasn’t actually acted on their genotypes to alter the genomics of their particular population. Yes, fast food and sodas don’t help. But no one forces people to eat badly – cultural norms hopefully can be changed via a massive education effort …

Many would argue that the food companies created sugary processed foods *in response* to government guidelines advising a switch to a low fat diet. To make the low fat foods more palatable, they increased sweeteners. And if you believe in the carbohydrate-insulin theory of obesity, this change created the obesity epidemic.

But if you’re someone of a certain political persuasion like George, you’ll naturally put the blame on the people who reacted to government advice.

> And if you believe in the carbohydrate-insulin theory of obesity . . .

I suppose you have never heard of

Personally, I am way past believe, and know. Put bluntly, grocery stores are gigantic crime scenes, where most of the stuff on sale is a disguised poison. Look around. Children with type two diabetes. Does that add or subtract from GDP?

Yeah I recently got into the Paleo diet, and trying to cook everything from unprocessed foods.
Its virtually impossible unless you go visit the local farmers market with $200 in cash every week and even then it is very hard for me to stay true to the diet all the time.

I keep finding corn syrup & other corn products in the damdest of places. And bleach. I dont know what America’s obsession with bleach is, but it is everywhere: bleached flour, bleached meat, bleached grains, etc.

And the companies actively trick you. They plaster “organic” on everything, which I find dubious. Non-GMO too.

So you buy something as harmless as ground walnuts, thinking its just walnuts. False! There’s corn starch in it. And the corn starch was bleached.

Juice today is what syrup was 50 years ago. I never understood how during the last 2 decades of health consciousness, drinks have gotten more and more sugar added with no FDA limit or DV. Now the average must be 30g of sugar per drink, which is like your ancient ancestor eating 250 blueberries in one sitting minus all the fiber and vitamins.

I can never trust the meat. 1st, EU doesn’t even accept US chicken because of the whole bleach/chemical things (which is pathetic). Beef is equally dubious. I know a few farmers and they say that “grass fed” is a whole load of bullshit. Basically, you can a cow skittles (which they do BTW) and it can still be called “grass fed”.

Organic is another misnomer. If you your cattle ‘organics’ but those organics are in turn covered with glyphosate, then your meat is contaminated by an industrial chemical.

Eggs are insane. If everyone in America had to visit an egg packing facility, they would probably never touch another egg in their life: poultry so infected, they pop when removed from cages. I even saw poultry that mustve been born in the same cage it sat its whole life, that its skin had grown around the wire. Permanently grown around the wire.

Corn, sugar beets, soya and rapeseed(canola, an industrial lubricant). all are heavily subsidized by our tax money, dominated by supranational behemoths and grow much, much more of the stuff than is needed for actual foodstuffs.
ergo—corn products(sic) are in literally everything, as are the rest.(and remember, that cheap parmesan contains a lot of sawdust in it, so it’s not like “health”(tm) is really a concern)
These “commodity crops” can also be deployed as a weapon…a la Mexico after Nafta…creating follow on problems.
all this is hopelessly entangled with the rest of the rentier parasitium, so I don’t really know how to fix it from here.

I am similar to the doctor in your link. I’ll never forget my physiology professor saying you could eat butter – to make the point that weight WAS ONLY calories in, calories out.
Years later and health concerns, I needed to lose weight. Nothing worked until I went low carb. And it worked because I wasn’t hungry.
I hate it when scientists (being a scientist and being smart are two different things) do “experiments” of different diets (low carb or low fat) of caloric equivalence (which weighs more – a pound of feathers or a pound of lead?) and when they get the same results (no weight loss) conclude that there is no difference in the types of food one eats.
Eating french fries (excuse me, freedom fries….we’re not saying that anymore???) potato chips, candy, cookies, etcetera just made me wanna eat, eat, eat MOAR!
Turning off the carbs, at least for me, turned off the insatiable need to continually eat.
I believe modern foods play havoc with normal satiety. BUT OF COURSE if you make money by selling high priced snacks, wouldn’t your foods BE DESIGNED to make you want to eat?
How long did it take to figure out tobacco companies manipulated nicotine….

When I first visited Bangkok, six or seven years ago now, I can’t remember seeing a single obese person. Coming from America, that seemed quite remarkable!

Now, obesity is common (although still not ubiquitous). The obvious reason would be the penetration of Western food chains: Dunkin Donuts, McDonalds, Swansons, and KFC are everywhere, as are convenience stores with sugary snacks. Six or seven years ago, I also never saw a child having a temper tantrum. Now that too is not unusual, especially for the middle class children (who can afford more of the more expensive Western food).

I despise all the researchers who do not think genetics plays a role in different diets causing diabetes in different people in different ways. There are many people with changes in the TCF7L2 gene who are more likely to get diabetes on a high fat/low carb diet.

Most of the diabetes you see today is not a direct result of sugar or fats, but the oxidative stress from malnutrition that kill the pancreatic beta cells.

Sugar is a drug. It comes in bags of white crystals, makes you feel good, but damages your health. It’s a hundred billion dollar industry, and the early sugar drug barons built vast estates on kidnapping people and forcing them to work as slaves in the fields.

Well the problem is probably that processed food is not palatable without a lot of doctoring. The population as a whole never really adopted a low fat diet, fat consumption as a whole only dipped slightly. It’s a difficult diet so no wonder. But yes companies did use it as an excuse to market processed garbage (which they maybe would have done anyway, they make processed food afterall – but with dietary trends they could slap on a “low fat” label). And people would be better off eating real food of any fat content.

Fat is an awesome taste enhancer. When the American government and the American consumer demanded low-fat or lower fat foods, the food industry responded by replacing fat with the next best things, salt and sugar. Salt is already bad enough, but sugar is particularly heinous. Just look at Coke; a can of coke has ten teaspoons of sugar. Coca Cola Corp adds acids to mask the sugar allowing them to put that much without making us gag. The sugar nonetheless acts as a “drug” provoking various reactions including cravings for more sugar!

As a further comment, blame the movie theater industry for a large part of our obesity problem. Super-sizing was not invented by McDonald’s; it was invented by movie theaters to sell more popcorn. Now you can buy “individual” sodas at 7-11 that hold 50 ounces of tasty beverage and contain about 40 teaspoons of sugar!

Unless you already have hypertension, salt isn’t that bad for most people. I suspect salt gets a bad name in large part because sugar producers want to blame something else. If one removes both sugar and salt from one’s diet, what’s left is intolerably unpalatable… at which point we abandon the whole thing.

Exercise commercials are fairly common, “Just by this giant new piece of equipment for only thousands of dollars and you’ll have the body of Adonis in just 8 short weeks!” Fat people should be in a constant state of fear and desire – big potential market. Personally, my house isn’t big enough for that stuff, so I just walk the dog.

Eat an apple? The fresh fruit that comes to market these days is intended for seasonal displays — not eating! Apples especially are best for an Autumn harvest motif combined with a pumpkin and some ears of dried corn. Eat an apple? Might as well eat a piece of wax fruit. Real apples look more realistic, they’re already coated with wax and they’re usually enough less expensive than the 100% wax apples that you can just throw them away when they’re served their purpose. Besides, I thought they were covered with highly toxic nerve poisons that only come off after two cycles in the dishwasher. So, eat an apple? Just grab a can of applesauce.

Reminds me of those people that have MacDonalds burgers many years old on display that never rot when you think that the bacteria would go to work on it. I guess that the reason is that bacteria do not recognize it as ‘food’ at all.

Regarding another reader’s comment on housing as health care, to the best of my knowledge this began with Charles King and Eric Sawyer, who, decades ago at ACTUP, promoted this idea. In the farthest section of the East Village of New York City, there is AIDS housing where medical appointments can also be had on the premises. This is part of the model.

(King also started Housing Works charity shops in New York. I once saw him on a panel at the New York Academy of Medicine. He said that to pay former addicts weekly in order that they stay clean worked; other methods did not. Of course, the rest of the panel ignored his claim.)

I have a general question: Have there ever been any “good” chief executives of any of the “great corporate empires?” Hewlett or Packard, maybe, or maybe not? Good in the sense of pro-social, massively less self-rewarding, concerned about and active in avoiding or minimizing externalities, people who were carriers and proponents of “vision” as the mopes tend to understand the term (seeing trends and doing stuff that will have broad benefits, minimal negatives, and move in healthy directions for the planet)? Stuff like that? Or is it all the other kind?

And a second question: Do Zuckerberg and Cook and Bezos, etc., “have the tiger by the tail,” , or are they directing their minions to drive the political economy in the ugly (for huge numbers of individuals) directions they are doing? I’d think, based on the public image he displays, Zuck is more likely to be mostly the former, at least partially a prisoner of the platform and the evil drives it has the summoned. Maybe the others are more like the Kochs, doing active and intentional antisocial stuff just for moneypower and to suit the world to their parched selves and souls.

On the tangent, I was drawn to think about summoning demons, in the cogitation that led to the second question. So I queried the web, and Lo! There’s this whole gigantic bunch of material on how to summon, evoke, and/or conjure demons, including “summoning demons to make a deal.” Look it up yourselves, I don’t care to make it easy, since it sure seems like something of the sort I’d facilitating a lot of the bad stuff (my definition, of course) that’s happening.

More people in high places use psychics than you want to think, and therefore it is not a stretch to think that some also try to use the dark arts.

I hardly got around in New Age circles, yet by virtue of going to Santa Fe a fair bit, I met a woman who was Disney’s psychic (they’d present her as a consultant, and she also had a background in marketing, so she could carry it off) and one at Morgan Stanley. The Morgan Stanley guy was an ex Marine who sat next to CEO John Mack on a long flight, the psychic had had a near death experience, apparently had all sorts of paranormal insights after that. Mack was persuaded, hired the guy to be in the HR department as his cover for having him at lots of senior meetings. His role for Mack was to tell him who was lying and scheming against him. His role was well enough known in the company that the guy and his wife held New Agey courses that had some Morgan Stanley attendance; a Morgan Stanley person encouraged me to attend one. I did and it struck me as very cultish even by the general cultish tendencies of this realm.

New Agers and their styles come and go. My dad is from Salem, Mass, so he always knew a New Ager. I suspect they gravitated to him in hopes that “Salem” was a source of meaning. It wasn’t the dippy hippie type you might expect. Dad was a corporate attorney.

My mom knew a bunch of New Agers over the years and coordinated my Catholic Church’s adult conversion process for a bit, and for the most part, she felt they were both simply people who felt isolated and needed access to a community but didn’t want their original community. The only “converts” she thought were on the level were the spouses of Catholics who had been attending Mass for years or young adults who missed Confirmation and were checking off boxes. Where I lived, Catholics were probably 2 to 4% of the population, but had the second and third largest regular parish memberships. There were so many sketchy churches.

The New Age types always seem to have a missing community aspect of their life.

His batting average was about like that of an average baseball hitter, but he sure did hit big from time to time. Sort of ‘accidentally’ called 9/11 five years early by getting the year and month and major, major bond market rally correct, without describing the event itself.

Psychics and astrologers are one thing. Nancy Reagan and erm, Hitler and all those Roman emperors had recourse to those types. From the comments here, I now am curious about what anyone knows about the other kind of occult stuff I mentioned — the invocation and summoning of demons and other kinds of “dark assistance” by our owners and financiers and rulers.

Of course none of the special people would seek an edge from the underworld…

it wouldn’t surprise me one bit to learn(definitively) that there’s an underground at the highest levels where dark arts are dabbled with.
for the record, I’m a mystic agnostic, but I’ve studied religion all my life.
part of that study was what we might term “the occult”..which I’m using broadly.
There’s documented history of various such endeavors: michael aquino, Luce, for that matter, skull and bones and that private lodge outside of San Fran with the giant Owl statue.
people with power are entrained to try to keep and increase that power, by any means necessary.
Do they really believe that doing sigil magic will boost profits? Hell if I know…maybe it contains that element, but also elements of blackmail…or even merely the thrill of transgression.
I think of peter thiel and the blood of virgins or whatever.
us’n’s out here will probably never know the truth of the matter, but I’ve bumped into enough upper echelon weirdness in my life to know that there’s a lot of crazy people out there, in some surprising positions.
the rich are different than other people.

“Dark Arts” and “New Age” groups aren’t really connected from year to year, but its the same thing. They find a book and decide to try. It does pop up periodically.

“Druid” (not an organized or remotely single religion) mimicry is a pretty common “worship” that pops up through out the centuries at different times and places with people copying half remembered stories and things they read. It happens. Indulgences after all…its probably not a majority or a strong minority but people are still the same. Pretending to be “druids” will happen again as long as mankind exists.

Its not specific to your question, but Foucaults Pendulum by Umberto Eco covers this phenomenon. Dark Arts, Lucifer, Gnostic (how many places did Mary Magdeline really settle down in after the Crucifixtion? 50, 100?), New Age, Wiccan and so forth, they aren’t all the same, but how they come into being are similar or even what they represent. The appeal of possessing secret knowledge even if there is nothing there (especially when there is nothing) is a thrill.

In Classical times, oracles and soothsayers were part of the official decision making system. Augurs were officials who “read” various signs.

If you look closely at the stories, in practice they were used mostly where the decision didn’t matter much (eg, the exact time to sail on an expedition) or there was just no way to know. Today, we roll dice or flip a coin. People like to have some authority for arbitrary decisions.

I seem to remember that some years ago the CEO of Shaw Flooring had an epiphany understanding the ecological damage his company was doing and comitted to sustainability. I’m no corporate environmental analyst, but, the companys’ comittment still seems strong.

Maybe not the best reference but Robert Townsend’s Up The Organization:How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits self-reports him turning down a pay raise offered by his (American Express) board….long, long, long (35 years) ago.

Zuck is more likely to be mostly the former [Good in the sense of pro-social, massively less self-rewarding, concerned about and active in avoiding or minimizing externalities, people who were carriers and proponents of “vision”], at least partially a prisoner of the platform and the evil drives it has the summoned.

Having previously lived and worked, for 25 years (Grave Shift, Swing Shift and Day Shift), within 5 or less minutes drive of Facebook’s current Corporate Domicile™, where an entire: black, hispanic, asian american, neighborhood has been decimated by Facebook — under Mark Zuckerberg’s watch —I’m curious and (to be honest) dumbfounded, as to how you came to that conclusion; particularly given the comments (The dumb f—ks) and associations (e.g. Peter Thiel) Mark Zuckerberg is infamous for, since Facebook’s inception.

Can you explain further how you came to that conclusion that Mark Zuckerberg is Pro Social? (and do read this, in case you haven’t already ).

Yes, I’m very’ late in the day;’ actually, well into the evening, for many, in making this comment — which I read, much to my dismay, at the ‘top of the morning,’ — I tried all day to ignore it, but I just can’t ignore it.

Yves–
You should be able to do a special order through an Apple dealer to upgrade RAM. I think the cost is $190. 10-14 business days. This was true at least until the recent release of laptops; I believe it still is correct.

No, the memory chips are soldered to the motherboard (now called the logic board, I refuse to adopt the new nomenclature). I have this confirmed from two vendors. This is the detail:

It is physically impossible to upgrade the RAM on any MacBook Pro’s with a Retina screen, as the RAM is soldiered onto the logic board. Upgrading RAM can only be done on the non Retina models, which are 2012 and older. Technically a new logic board could be purchased and swapped, but that is an extremely expensive part, a fair bit of labor, and then it would not have AppleCare+, so I would not recommend it.

I thought it was called a motherboard because you plugged things into it, but how can you if everything is soldered in?

Unfortunately, a discrete GPU is soldered in on the Macbook Pro’s that have one (pre-2015), a part that will eventually fail and likely brick the machine after enough thermal cycles. Been there, done that and now have a top-of-the-line, 15″ Apple-refurbished doorstop.

It’s called a motherboard because it’s the component everything else communicates through. The other components, called daughterboards, slot into the motherboard. It’s the central hub that all the other parts that do the majority of the work connect to each other through.

Given Apple’s continually growing propensity to sell people hardware they don’t actually get to own, can I ask why you (and others) still look to their products? While they might be more generally stable than PCs, I don’t see how the increased cost and lack of customization can be justified.

We’ve moved from having to have a designated “tech guy” (Apple certified) or schedule appointments at the Mac store just to have basic upgrades applied to your computer to not even being able to apply those upgrades at all. Apple machinations go beyond what it wants to provide users to how it wants users to use what is provided. If that fails the user… hey just buy the new model!

What is worse is that, since Apple is so successful, overall products are negatively affect as competitors race to mimic apple. Look at how smart phone designs have changed. Samsung for instance has adopted the large screen, hard to open and manipulate model that Iphone uses. Or in another, further removed case look at MP3 players. The Ipod was so successful that it destroyed all the competitors… then apple crapified the product leaving a wasteland of no alternatives. Luckily PC has a large enough user base that the consumer utility can’t be sacrificed like that (knock on silicon).

Maybe Apple is shooting for the TI 99/4a market? Anyone remember that? Where all the accessories plugged in side by side to the keyboard/CPU, so you needed an 8 foot long work space with the seating at the left end, to fit the thing together? And where the slightest jiggle of any of the parts would unseat the cheap connectors and reboot or fail the whole assemblage?

At least you could add memory to it. I just recently sent mine off to recycle/land.

It was a good game machine for its day, and God bless ‘em, it still has loyalists at TI99.com…

I’ve used Apple for 20 years. I know what software works for my purposes, and there are no equivalents available for either Windows or Linux. So, switching to Linux would require I stop everything and learn to use whatever comes closest to my Mac apps and hope I can achieve the same results.

In other words, my business runs on Mac, and it’s the kind of business that’s software-dependent. And for all their stupid “upgrades,” my Macs are still the best thing for what I need to do. I suspect were you to talk to other people who run business in the creative arts, you’ll get the same response. It’s why we are increasingly outraged that Apple is choosing to put style and “innovation” above functionality.

Don’t give up hope. Since 1995 I’ve had a Linux ministry that is very slowly gaining converts. A couple of years ago I installed Linux Mint in the office of a small local business; it’s been working fine and I taught the office manager how to use the software update tool. Then just yesterday she asked me to install Linux on a used Thinkpad she bought, saying, “I’m familiar with Linux now, and want to use the same software from home.” Yay!

Thank you for the Andrew Dobbs piece–interesting reading. I think the point still unaddressed is that labor is becoming less important to corporations, so it has less power. The working class is becoming ever smaller; the people who make it up remain. Most of the 100M “not in workforce” in this country lack economic power, and thus lack political power as well. Add to that the myriad low-wage workers who don’t vote, and here we are. Dreams of the workers or renters rising again are not going to manifest unless something else changes.

#2. If those 100M voted for democratic socialist candidates, or candidates that actually wanted to make government work for them, you would be sure they would be listened to. 100M voting in lockstep would shake the political foundations of this country. You just have to get them all to stop being atomized by modern politics.

The marginalized don’t have political power until they realize that they do.

people on the margins face immediate consequences if they stop paying the rent, and if the only choice is buying food from walmart or dollar general, or driving to the next town, there are limited options for refusing to buy corporate products. if it were all done at once, yeah, 100 million could disrupt the family blog out of the system. general strike!

How can you force people to buy new machines more frequently if they are allowed to do field upgrades? Adding extra RAM as a mid-life kicker is usually very cost effective. I’ve written off Apple when I had to buy a long handle torx screwdriver to crack the case of the original Mac to upgrade the RAM and put in a larger disk later (and void the warantee in the process). The screwdriver, case spreader, and RAM was less than half the cost of letting Apple do it. That was in the late 80’s and things have only gone down hill since then.

Is there any compelling reason to fight a giant corporation that is dedicated to crapifying its product?

I think its reached the point where “power” useds are going to start doing side by side tests: MacBook pro vs MS surface vs a cheap used high-end Dell.

I too dumped macs several years ago because of the corporate arrogance
toward their “power” users.

Still dont like windows, but W10 is getting close to as useful as mac for my needs. I also like being able to quickly replace a lost, dropped or worn out machine for $700. My needs these days are few, however.

Re: Los Angeles is first in US to install subway body scanners. From the article:

“We’re dealing with persistent threats to our transportation systems in our country,” said Transportation Security Administration Administrator David Pekoske. “Our job is to ensure security in the transportation systems so that a terrorist incident does not happen on our watch.”

This is the great thing about the War on Terror, it never ends and by definition it cannot be won. You cannot defeat a tactic. But terrorism does give the government excuses to slowly but surely eliminate civil liberties and create a panopticon state. The public helps to drive this process by vastly overestimating the likelihood of being killed by a terrorist.

Otis is out on Cape Cod, Langley is near DC. And there were fighter jets a lot closer at multiple installations much nearer to the crash sites, and people have been questioning why no Top Gun intercept on 9/11 for a long time. Of course the Narrative has lots of FUD answers, and all such questions have been pretty much moved over into the conspiracy-theory category. Here’s an early piece, post-attack, raising the questions and offering a few answers:

I often wonder what the purpose of scrambling fighter jets in a suspected hijacking. Is it to kill all passengers to presumably save people in a skyscraper that the plane MAY crash into. Sounds so stupid but wait .. don’t answer that. We’re dealing with the Dept of Homeland Security.

I read that Cheney was running around giving orders for that airliner over Pennsylvania to be shot down on 9/11. He was probably afraid that that airliner might crash where he was. If that sounds like a bit if a stretch, consider this. After Bush and Cheney were defeated by Obama in ’08, one of the first things to happen was that the Google satellite images of the vice-President’s house was stopped being blurred. Apparently macho-Cheney was so afraid for his life that he had all images of his residence blurred so that terrorist couldn’t use them to plan an attack on him. True story that.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking uh… looks like we’re going to be delayed today getting off the ground because uh… I forgot my keys. They’re sitting on the counter at my house, so sit tight while I uh… just run back and grab them.”

I had to calm a family member about this.. they kept saying “What if it was a terrorist?”. I told her that she has no problems entering a vehicle that kills 30,000 people a year, yet you are worried about terrorists that have killed less that 4,000 people in this country. The terrorist Boogeyman is everywhere and yet we ignore the daily violence we shrug off in our own lives.

“We’re dealing with persistent threats to our transportation systems in our country,”
yeah, it’s called underfunding, but scanners spend money into the private sector and of course we need a healthy scanner business sector. Our country is hopelessly effed.

Further to Clive’s comments on the absurd Brexit legal challenge, Art 50 gives a member state the right to withdraw from the Treaty “in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.” In the UK, the Crown (in practice the government) negotiates and ratifies treaties, and has the right to withdraw from them. Not only is there no need (or provision) for a referendum, but there was no need for a parliamentary vote on the principle (though because Brexit would have a lot of legal implications, there’s a role for Parliament there). In recent years, but in a very small number of cases, there has been a tendency for governments to secure their political position by having a parliamentary vote, and, in this disastrous case, a referendum in advance. But that’s essentially theatre.

The referendum was a theatre, that badly backfired. As I wrote few days back here, no referendum in the UK can have any but advisory role, so technically there’s no need to run a second referendum – if the Parliament decides that it tries to retract A50, it can do it anytime it wants to.

I’d disagree on the A50 notification tough, as the problem there is that it deprives UK citizens of certain rights (FoM for example), and the UK government/The Crown does not have right to strip UK citizens of rights enshrined in domestic law except temporarily (like in an emergency), only the Parliament can do that. Technically, IF the parliament passed the revocation of ECA 1972, THEN the government would not have needed the Parliament to ok the A50 invocation (as the right would have been stripped already) – but the Parliament can’t easily revoke ECA 1972 w/o crashing out of EU at the same time.

Yes, this was an argument back in 2015, when people were debating Grexit, that if Greece tried to leave the EU, that Greek citizens would be able to sue the government for the loss of EU citizen rights.

Still (groan) being chewed over in the UKSC via-a-vis Scotland. Here is take:

EU law provides for the withdrawal of a Member State from the European Union, and the disapplication of EU law as regards that Member State upon withdrawal. Article 50(1) TEU provides that “[a]ny Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements”. Article 50(3) TEU provides for the date on which, in the event of such a decision, “[t]he Treaties shall cease to apply”.

Although it operates on the international plane, Article 50 TEU is part of “EU law” […]

Securing legal certainty, in the context of withdrawal from the EU necessarily involves enabling the statute book to be made ready, in advance, so that on and following withdrawal, it can continue to operate effectively. A Member State which has given notification under Article 50 TEU is not required by EU law to wait until it has withdrawn from the EU before it may lawfully take steps to address the consequences of withdrawal for its statute book— indeed, to fail to take such steps could arguably be in breach of the EU law principle of legal certainty—provided that this is done in a manner which respects the supremacy of EU law up until withdrawal.

Or, in plainer English than that rather dense legalese, if the EU permits a Member State to leave, then there has to be a mechanism which facilitates that happening. The TFEU can’t have Article 50 which prima facie permits leaving the EU, but then opens the door for such constitutional gumming up of the works to block that from ever happening.

That’s the Lord Advocate’s written submission and pretty convincing it looks to me. Other Member States would be able to put forward similar legal arguments under their constitutional courts.

But it is always going to be a big fat constitutional mess. If (shudder) any other Member State is ever dumb enough to try this.

A quibble about Caitlin Johnstone’s column on Facebook censorship: while some are now saying “Aha, we told you Silicon Valley was run by the government” it may be more that people like Zuckerberg and the Googlers are trying to keep their sites within the zone of acceptable opinion by their fellow ten percenters and one percenters–in other words less conspiracy theory and more mass psychosis spurred by “thought leaders.” Whether these thought leaders at the press and think tanks are themselves pawns of the government–and there’s a history–is another question. But there’s no need for a CT explanation. As Gore Vidal once said, the elites don’t need to conspire because they are already on the same team anyway.

Those not on the team may need to give Facebook and Google a pass. A hit to the bottom line will get their attention.

There were, briefly, articles a while back, which I verified, that stated Mark Warner and his Senate committee had flat-out ordered Zuckerberg et al. to “clean up” their services. Don’t forget, there were two reviews of Facebook archives that showed no evidence of “Russian interference.” Warner flies out to visit Zuckerberg, a third review occurs, and suddenly there’s $400K-worth of “Russia-paid ads”.

The narratives that are being silenced aren’t the ones that disturb the 1%. They’re the ones that counter the official government narratives coming from sources actually where the action is. Both Venezuela Analysis and TeleSUR have posted that the turmoil in both Venezuela and Nicaragua are supported by the US; the official narrative, of course, is that both governments there are leftist dictatorships. And then there comes an attempted assassination of Maduro with roots in Columbia barely weeks after Columbia becomes the first non-North Atlantic member of NATO. Within a week, both those news agencies are shut down on Facebook, although VA was restored after 24 hours.

Coincidence? Maybe. Combined with all the other things I’ve observed, including the fact both NC’s and Consortioum News’s comment sections developed the same issue of delayed posts in the same week, I’m going to keep my foil hat right here handy.

Good point and outfits like Facebook and Google are certainly creatures of the government to the extent that they fear regulation and antitrust. But at this point the government is headed by Trump, not Warner.

The Atlantic Council is NATO’s mouthpiece and so Zuckerberg’s choice of them to “fact check” and ride herd on so called fake news probably accounts for the recent bootings. Atlantic Council spokepeople appear on the Newshour and other such programs all the time and so my point about the media driving this may also be valid. In fact there’s probably a much fuzzier line these days between the media and the government than SV and the government.

It wasn’t enough that US foreign policy pushed together two mutually antagonistic powers such as Russia and China into a mutual survival pact. They are now pushing other countries like Iran and Turkey to also take shelter in this pact while getting these and other countries to reduce their US dollar dependency. And I am not even sure why the attack on Turkey unless for Trump they represent an easy target to get to roll over. Maybe because they balked at US demands to let a Kurdish state be formed on their borders which they would have been nuts to agree with. The US would sooner agree to letting a Marxist nation be formed on the Mexican border. I can only imagine what a book on the history of American Diplomacy will read like in thirty years time.

Was it Wolf Street? or Automatic Earth? where it was mentioned that Emerging Markets account for 50% of global economic growth? Turkey is part of that.
It’s important for the people who own things to own that growth; so politics be damned. They need market swings to shake things loose and buy them up.

Oh no, that would be like a Jubilee, with untold consequences for the rest of us! We would once again (see bank bailout/GFC) have to start rebuilding the edifice and our personal wealth from SCRATCH! /s

It may just be that we’ve reached a point in the empire’s life-cycle that when anything it does to enforce its hegemony simply backfires. A point at which it has run out of ammunition (no pun intended) successfully to enforce obedience by others. Trump is actually a pretty good embodiment of the empire’s loss of power – he (or whoever is behind him) strikes out in every direction, only to achieve the exact opposite of what he says he wants. It’s like the boy who cried wolf too many times – a moment comes when no one believes him anymore. The empire has been de-fanged. Although I have no doubt that it still has some devious plan up its sleeve. So, we’re nowhere near being off the roller-coaster yet.

Dollar General thought Haven’s council should give the company a $72,000 break on its utility bills, equivalent to the cost of running the town’s library and swimming pool for a year, on the promise of jobs and tax revenues. The council blanched but ended up offering half of that amount to bring the low-price outlet to a town that already had a grocery store.
…..
Buhler’s council called two public meetings in March to gauge the mood of residents and invited Doug Nech, owner of neighbouring Haven’s only grocery store, the Foodliner, to speak. Dollar General had driven his shop out of business days earlier.*
…..
Nech calls Dollar General “a cancer” but reserves his anger for Haven’s council for subsidising a hugely profitable corporation to compete against him. He asked the council to cut his shop’s utility bill to $100 a month until the Foodliner received a matching benefit. It refused, saying that Dollar General had taken advantage of a programme to bring in new business while Nech’s was long established.
====================================================
* Whenever jobs are being “created” do they subtract the jobs lost? And “new” jobs better than existing jobs???

WalMart is also famous for the ‘jobs gained’ versus ‘jobs lost’ metric.
I have been known to joke about the ‘jobs sacrificed per rivet on the Walton families yachts ratio.’ I can tell the degree of oppression in a stores management labour dynamic by the reactions I get from cashiers when I trot that “joke” out.

What amazes me about Walmart is that I’ve spoken with a few employees at our local one, & those that have been there for decades have long been ‘capped out’ & will never get another raise, yet they are always the nicest & most helpful, from my experience. (I try to shop there as little as possible, but must for some things).

Therefore, those who have just started will far surpass them in wages.

Yet again, from my own experience, most new hires seem to have the attitude, “Hey, I showed up for work. What more do ya want?” & are often flat-out lazy & unwilling to stop texting on their phones to help anyone. Much easier to say, “We no longer carry that”, or, “We must be out”– without ever looking.

So much for loyalty, eh? (It also doesn’t bode well for the lack of work ethic shown by the younger generation being hired, either).

That shows Walmart’s total disrespect for their long-time employees, but when it’s the only job in town…

May the rivets all pop at once in their yachts as their lifeboats float away.

If the employer has no respect for either customers or employees, why should the customers or employees do any more than the minimum necessary. Maybe if those younger workers had a decent work environment, where they were treated with respect, they’d have better attitudes.

I find the workers disdain for the ‘quality’ of the work they produce to be a mirror for the middle managements attitude towards the hourly workers. To cut the middle management some slack; they are treated as badly by upper management as the floor workers are by all of the above. Indeed, a case could be made for the establishment of a Middle Managers Union. Such a dynamic is fertile ground for union organizing activity. No wonder the WalMart upper management is so afraid of unions. There is Power lying in the aisles. “Class Cleanup aisle Thirteen!”

I must be jumping too fast yet again. There must be a delay between posting a comment and the algo’s putting it up for all to laugh at. The ‘original’ comment was not up for a few minutes while I typed the plaint about the “Monsters From the IT.” (“Will Dr. Morbius please engage with the Ultraviolet Courtesy Comm?”)

Thanks Rev. One of the more creative movies made in Hollywood. Basic plot by Shakespeare, unnaturally pollinated by Lovecraft. (The shape of the Krell doorways matches Lovecraft’s description of the ‘rugose beings’ awakened in Antarctica. Awakened until their ‘Monsters from the Id’ in the formlessness of the Shoggoths sends them back to the nameless aeons from which they had originally escaped.)
‘Everything is stuck together. No one gets out of here sane.’

Re: Rubin Vitally needed public investment — everything from infrastructure to education and lifelong learning — might be deficit-funded
Mebbe you should have done this scolding to your buddy BHO. Most of the tower cranes I see are in two places, metro areas building condo towers (i.e. lots of building for rubins buddies to finance and fleece, not infrastructure), and university campus’ building industry favorable employee training centers in the engineering, computers, and the healthcare racket.
Also education funding supporter robert rubin headed the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (wait,what?) in 1999, , and their view on charter schools from the wiki state somewhat disingenuously
“Improving access to quality education[edit]
LISC is a major financier of charter schools nationwide.[22] According to the LA Times, at least a dozen schools in California would run out of money without financing from LISC designed to cover shortfalls in state funding.[23]” (Goebbels would beam with pride)
You would think as treasury secretary he might have been able to ease the shortfall that he seems to have been aware of in 1999, instead it’s vouchers from the gov taking public school money and giving it to private partiers. Maybe it could have been spent on “vitally needed infrastructure”? And life long learning?. I’m wondering where is the money in that scam, but since rubin said it, the grift has to be there somewhere…Dr. Frankenstein seems appalled at the monster he created.
I think I’ll fix it for him…
Vitally needed public investment — everything from infrastructure to education and lifelong learning — might be deficit-funded by having the plebes borrow the money from banksters in the form of mortgages and student loans otherwise the social institutions the banksters rely on (us military, as one good example) will have to look for private funding. Oh No’s echo through the halls of the reverent goldman sachs.

“We’re in a new age of obesity. How did it happen? You’d be surprised”

Wasn’t there a story here last year which talked about the same subject? The reason that I remember it was the fact that it showed pictures from an American campus and the casually-dressed students were all relatively trim in it and I mean all of them. There were a lot of comments about this story at the time. I may have even mentioned back then a story of a baseball stadium that was renovated but the owners found themselves about 6,000 seats down. The reason was that the newer seats were much wider than the original one from the forties and installing the newer ones meant less seats overall.

A good many CCC enrolees were dangerously underweight in the 1930’s, and along with learning skills, the camps served to nourish them into health with a varied menu. Here’s atypical fare from the CCC Camp @ Cain’s Flat, 20 miles down the road from where i’m typing:

When in the 1930s my grandfather lost his job and my grandmother went to apply for “relief”, instead of giving her money the government gave her a job, running what was basically a daycare center. Its main function was to make sure every child got at least one good meal a day. There was hunger in ranching country…

Re Google tracks. The GPS radio uses more than a bit of battery so it seems unlikely that it is on all the time. If that were true then turning it off would show no difference and there is an off setting.

However Google can track you quite precisely if you are on the web via an ISP. They don’t need GPS.

I wish I had an alternative to the Android/Apple ecosystem. After CyanogenMod died Lineage has not kept up with more recent hardware. Is there a phone out there with a true open source OS already installed?

That is not correct and I wish you would not present info that makes people insensitive to being GPS located.

GPS will locate you to +/- 5 feet and they are working on getting it to +/- one foot.

Triangulation gets you only to +/- 100 feet. And recall you need two towers. You can have signal with only one tower. You’d be amazed in Manhattan how many dead zones I hit, which means coming out of them you might have only one tower.

Triangulation has been found in court to be too imprecise to locate individuals for the purpose of prosecution.

And on top of that, GPS is in your phone. DHS seizes devices with no legal grounds. Cops often do too. So if someone has your device, they can get it to rat you out. It takes more doing to get your records fro the phone co.

GPS is inaccurate by design. There is a flaw built into civilian GPS systems. The US government was worried that the Soviets would be able to hit targets directly so they built in a flaw. Gosh! When you are launching 20 megaton bombs, I guess five feet matters!

I deliberately did not say hooked to the web via cell tower but instead to the web via wifi and a conventional ISP. I have an Android tablet with no GPS but with a mapping app that can show your location on it’s map. If I am within range of my neighbor’s wifi–just the beacon, not logged on–the map app will show my location exactly. Of course this same zeroing in applies to conventional computers using browsers.

The stated accuracy for GPS is 5 meters, not feet.

Claimed accuracy for the upcoming European nav system will be 1 meter in special mode. This probably reflects improvements in the satellites’ clock accuracy. The US GPS system goes back to the 1970s and is slated for upgrade.

And finally it is my contention that if the GPS that is in all smartphones was turned on all the time regardless of user settings then the lack of change in battery use when you seemingly turn GPS off on those phones would be a telltale that these phones are doing some funny business.

Happy to be contradicted in any of this if I’ve got it wrong but I’ve been using GPS practically since it became commercially available and do have some personal experience using it.

Also Google was once sued for using their Streetview cars to record wifi locations and identifiers in Germany. They claimed it was due to a rogue employee but quite likely there are databases of all US wifi signals and their locations.

When I first glimpsed Alex Jones, the thought was, geez it’d be great to watch somebody wound tighter than a 2 bit watch, implode on camera, as I felt sure he’d spontaneously combust into flames, rhetorically or temperature-wise, with an emphasis on the latter happening.

Don’t forget that a lot of stuff that was derided as ‘conspiracy theory’ a decade or two ago has now turned out to have been true. Alex Jones might be all the rotten things he’s accused of, but that doesn’t make all the stuff he brings into the public sphere rotten as well. there’s a lot of ‘guilt by association’ going on in the MSM “Official” Zone today. After all, the ‘RussiaRussiaRussia’ meme is pure and bald faced propaganda, without very much if any substantive evidence backing it up.
Also, the tiny Cynic Devil sitting on my Left shoulder is whispering in my ear, (the Faithful Angel sometimes perched on my Right shoulder having evidently taken an extended vacation,) Alex can be made to have an ‘unfortunate accident’ much more easily while out of the public eye.

Indeed, an ‘Evil Russia Mythos’ has been resummoned from the Pit of Oblivion to spread the ‘Badspel’ of the ‘Revelations of the MSM-IC.’ The Sign whereat one may recognize the Fruits of the Dispensation is a Mockingbird.

Manafort’s lawyers closed without calling defense witnesses is more likely an indication that they had none to call whose testimony would improve the image of Paul Manafort. Calling them could have backfired, if they were unlikely to hold up well under cross examination. Calling Manafort himself was never gonna happen. His lawyers closed because they were in the best position they were ever going to be in.

However, I could have easily seen Manafort’s side calling expert witnesses to point out that companies report for tax differently than for accounting purposes all the time, to defuse the bit about Manafort having taken $ out of his co’s and calling it a loan for IRS purposes, then trying to depict it as income with the bank.

RE why “Elephants rarely get cancer. Here’s why this matters to humans”, the simplest explanation seems to have been ignored. Elephants are plant eaters as opposed to omnivore (or the carnivores that follow the Atkin’s diet) humans. Processed meats are a Class I known carcinogen and all meats in general are a probable carcinogen by the IARC. Not only do meat products cause cancer through free radicals and oxidative stress, but there are also complex epigenetic and hormonal effects.

If by, free lunch, you mean ivory tusks, then yes, there is indeed always a predator looking for a free lunch, otherwise, I thought adult elephants had no predators, other than humans, save in exceptional situations.

They are definitely stressed, however, by diminishing roaming territory in which to find ever more scarce food and water resources adequate to their large needs. And the number killed by humans every year and the resulting collateral harm to individual herds is simply staggering.

There are a lot of possible explanations for different cancer rates in humans and any other species, without concluding anything about lifestyle or genetics. I would suspect the major causes of elephant deaths are infectious disease and predation (by humans or animal predators). Infectious diseases and violent death were much higher as causes of death in our ancestors than in the modern world. It stands to reason that since the overall death rate equals 100%, the things that are left to kill us, like heart disease and cancer, are going to statistically increase in relative incidence. If we reduce the incidence of dying from any particular cause, all the other causes will then relatively increase to add up to 100%. I’d be curious if there is any knowledge of cancer rates in traditional hunter-gatherer societies. I would be surprised if it was not much lower, because they are much more likely to die of other causes and have high infant mortality rates. This may be analogous to elephants in the natural environment. This is not to say our lifestyle choices don’t influence our longevity, but something will get you in the end, regardless.

They are known risk factors for _some_ cancers. Like bowel/colorectal. Where they increase incidence from about 37 in 1000 to about 45 in 1000 (lifetime) . Which is trivial compared to smoking risk for example – and you can happily get a lung/throat/etc. cancer as a vegan smoker – much more so that an Atkins diet non-smoker.

The point is that elephants and naked mole rats do not get ANY cancer. Full stop. Never, ever, any (well, that’s not entirely true, see below).
They tried to forcibly induce cancers in naked mole rats, and it just didn’t work – that is, as long as they were kept in their normal environment.

The two only known cases of naked mole rats having malignant tumors were described in 2016, in naked mole rats born and kept in captivity, with significantly higher O2 content than their natural habitat (i.e. 21% normal air vs. their usual 2-9%).

This idea that meats is dangerous and that vegetative mater is not is kind of strange. One who eats a vegetarian diet based upon non-organic items is going to be eating a lot more chemicals than someone who eats mostly meat because there are a lot more different chemicals used on the wide variety of vegetative matter we choose to eat.

And having owned and operated an organic vegetable farm I can say with certainty that you are not avoiding chemicals be eating only organic either. Trust evolution. You can eat anything with about the same amount of risk.

This always ends up hurting the left (the actual left, not the McResistance rainbow-flag-on-a Reaper-drone “left” that is permitted a platform in mainstream America), because leftists are the political faction that stands in the most stark opposition to the status quo which holds existing power structures in place.

Yes! and I love her McResistance description, except for calling it “left”, which it is not.

RE: Robot manipulates humans in creepy new experiment. Should we be worried? NBC (furzy)

Duh.

I guess it’s just a coincidence that apple and google give their “personal assistants,” i.e. robots, exotic names like siri and alexa by which these “devices” are “addressed” to activate. Oh, and are given female–mommy–voices with which to “respond.”

The official line is that customers like (i.e., are more likely to buy products with) female voiced personal assistants. Which is probably true, but apparently none of them have thought to ask themselves why that might be (then again it’s Silicon Valley – should we be surprised at that?) I am waiting for the first one with a male voice to come out, but I suspect it might be a while.

I agree we should be concerned, although not to sky-is-falling level. Like all new technologies it will have plenty of potential for abuse. For example, a hijacked elder care robot would probably be remarkably effective at the Nigerian scam.

There is another reason for using female voices and that is you can hear them better over background noise. I seem to recall that the US Air Force started using female voices for ground communications with aircraft on the tarmac decades ago because female voices penetrated better against the noise levels on the ground of aircraft getting ready to take off. Also, pilots being pilots, they listened to female voices better than male voices.

On George Monbiot’s article on obesity in the Guardian, the answer from Gary Taubes and others is sugar. Not calories, not lack of exercise, not sitting on the couch, not lack of moral fiber – or even the vegetable kind. Exercise makes us healthier and hungrier, not leaner.

Taubes and Robert Lustig go into the details of metabolic syndrome, the way the body regulates sugar and fat uptake and use, and what leads to retaining fat when we want to lose it. They also deal with the food “environment,” which has changed dramatically since 1940.

In brief, the story evolves around the ubiquity of highly-refined sugars in the American and now international diet. Lustig also notes that the medical establishment typically treats symptoms – diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and other symptoms of metabolic syndrome – rather than the underlying disease.

Highly-refined sugars are present in every processed food – the middle 2/3 of a typical grocery store. (More nutritious foods are on the perimeter.) Sugars are cheap, make the inedible edible, and may be addictive.

As Monbiot observes, the percentage of calories in our diet made up of sugars – listed under scores of names – has increased dramatically since his reference year of 1976. Billions of dollars of annual marketing sell us on eating it.

Real food is expensive, seasonal and spoils quickly. Added sugars, highly subsidized, make cheap foods edible and preserve it longer. It turns other foods into a snack. Yogurt, for example, would be nutritious were it not for the added sugar, which makes eating it as healthy as drinking a sugared cola.

The same with fruit juices, all natural or not. “No sugar added,” as a description of apple or orange juice, avoids that they are already highly sugared, but devoid of the fiber that makes eating an apple or orange a healthier alternative. Ubiquitous fat substitutes replace fat with sugars and gums, less nutritious than the lost fat.
has it right. The gist of his advice is to eat real, not processed, food that your grandmother would recognize as food. If it has a food label with more than five ingredients, try something else. Eat mostly plants – vegetables and whole fruits. Food nutrients are best when jumbled together with their fiber, not taken in refined form from a bottle. Limit meats, top predator fishes, and cured foods. Eat together.

His advice, though, illustrates a problem with income inequality. Real food is expensive, and in poor neighborhoods, hard to find. Packaged, bottled, and canned processed foods are easy and cheap, as is fast food. There’s an obvious racial component to that, too. Public health will not be improved as much as it could be until we address those problems.

In addition, the Taliban have launched a new set of offensives that may or may not have captured much of the city of Ghazni. The ANA also surrendered what appears to have been the neighboring airport.

Of more importance, though you have to search the obscure news sources, it appears that platoon-level Afghani force bases are being allowed by the Taliban to surrender and are doing so on a regular basis, i.e. several per day. That’s 10% a year losses or more, not counting combat losses, explaining why the ANA cannot keep its numbers up, Also, when smaller towns are overrun, the local National Government bureaucracy suffers negative consequences.

Deutsche Welle that receives 300 million Euro from the State each year and is supervised by the federal government closes the reader forum. The official reason is uncomfortable comments by the readers that significantly stress the patience of the editors. Well.

Excellent article this and yes, this whole leadership is almost a fetish. I have seen time and again in US military doctrine how leadership is at the core of how the military goes about its business. It even has its own doctrine manual () but in the higher echelons it does not work out in practice as shown by a recent article in Links on the fight in Afghanistan.
I was reading an account by a military writer of exercises at the National Training Center and even though he is a solid critic of the leadership practice of the US army, when the troops come up with a tactic that proves a winner in exercises, still credits that success to leadership because they trained their soldiers that way. So, no credit for the troops.
A small anecdote to how leadership is overdone. When the British Army was stationed in India in the 19th century, there was a British Regiment who found that all their officers, and I mean all of them, were required to be away from their Regiment for about a week or two. There was a lot of anguish among the officers about the Regiment not having any officers present. Remember, this was an era when if a soldier had to go to a train station, an NCO was assigned with the duty of taking him there. Eventually the Colonel came out and said that it could not be much of a Regiment if it could not take care of itself for a fortnight. The officers left and that Regiment did just fine.
The only real reason that I can see in the emphasis on leadership is that that justifies all sort of perks and privileges as well as huge pay-packets because they are ‘doing it all’, especially in the corporate sector. When you start getting CEO pay-packets in the range of $50-100 million you do wonder what you are getting for all that money. And was Jack Welch, for example, really worth his severance payment of $417 million when he retired from General Electric?